Bush website adopts isolationist stance

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The Register reports that Bush's website is blocking visitors from outside the US, citing an article from Netcraft which monitors the site from various points worldwide. Netcraft has noted that since Monday, www.georgewbush.com is reachable for visitors coming from within North America, while others (like me today) are greeted with a rude "Access Denied: You don't have permission to access http://georgewbush.com on this server." error message (a "403 forbidden" HTTP response for the geeks out there).

Bush's reelection campaign site is distributed via the Akamai CDN which provides a significant boost to bandwidth and resilience to flash crowds and attacks. This makes this ban even more surprising, IMO.

Well, may be that's the proof we were all waiting that, if re-elected, Bush would respect his promise to favor the moderate Republicans over the neocons, and consequently show some consideration for the foreigners out there!

Remember: promises bind only those who listen to them!

Update: ah! Being a customer of Akamai myself, I did the trivial test of finding the origin server via origin.georgewbush.com and, bingo! There you are, the origin server does not apply the ban. This further confirms my opinion that this ban is deliberate, and utterly stupid, politially speaking. Junior's site is also accessible at http://65.172.163.222/. Amateurs (private French joke).